@Carlyoung Ah, okay. It reminds me of how people with anti-social personality disorder will basically only change their behavior when convinced that it’s in their best interest to do so: that, in the long run, being nice to people and not going around breaking the law and stuff will get you further in life.

Awhile back I read a memoir by a deaf Finnish woman named Rajia who spent a few years in St. Lucia in the 1970s teaching at the island nation’s very first school for deaf children. Before then, St. Lucia had simply assumed deaf kids could not learn, so the children came to her without even knowing the rudiments of sign language. It was very difficult to teach them obviously. Anyway, she wound up basically adopting a deaf street child who, I think, probably had RAD. She named him Alfonso.

He had been passed around to various relatives for much of his life. No one wanted him, and by the time Raija met him he was homeless and supporting himself catch-as-catch-can by selling paper to wrap fish in, for example. He was about 12. He stayed with Raija’s family for seven months. Of course she wouldn’t have known but it sounds like Alfonso had reactive attachment disorder. She wrote that he never seemed to bond with anyone in the family or have affection for anyone, it was hard to disciple him and his behaviors made it hard for anyone to like him either. After seven months, he went stomping out of the house when she asked him to do some chores. She and others tried to get him to come back but he claimed he had been like a slave there. He resumed living on the streets and wouldn’t speak to Raija during the rare occasions he came to school. 15 years later she found out he was still homeless and had lost his sight in addition to his hearing.

My Heart is so heavy for you my dear friend, yet I GET it, I get it, what a situation, yet there is hope that as the healing starts you will feel lighter, you will know in your own Heart that this is the right thing, my daily prayers for you and your family start now.